superlinguo

[superlinguo]

Lingthusiasm Episode 107: Urban Multilingualism

When we try to represent languages on a map, it's common to assign each language a zone or a point which represents some idea of where it's used or where it comes from. But in reality, people move around, and many cities are host to hundreds of languages that don't show up on official records.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about urban multilingualism! We talk about a recent book we've been enjoying called Language City by Ross Perlin, about the over 700 languages spoken in New York City, as well as how we've noticed urban multilingualism for ourselves in Melbourne, Montreal, and elsewhere. We also talk about organizations that work with communities interested in reclaiming space for their languages, what linguistic rights are, and how to tell if yours are being taken away from you.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguistic landscapes! We talk about contrasts between the signs in the Chinatowns of Montreal and Melbourne, renaming streets from colonial names to names in First Nations languages, how signs can show the shifting demographics of tourism in an area, and how bi- and multilingual Lost Cat signs show what languages people think their neighbours understand. We also talk about our most absurd sign stories, including the Russell Family Apology Plaque, and creative imaginings of official signage, such as the Latin no-smoking sign in a modern-day British train station.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

'Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York' by Ross Perlin on Bookshop and Amazon

Wikipedia entry for N'Ko script

Endangered Language Alliance

The Endangered Languages Project Mentor Program

Wikitongues

Living Tongues Language Sustainability Toolkit

Living Languages

The Global Coalition for Language Rights Global Language Advocacy Days

The GCLR Statement on Understanding and Defending Language Rights

How we Created the GCLR’s Statement on Understanding and Defending Language Rights

Say it with Respect: A Journalists’ Guide to Reporting on Indigenous and Minoritized Languages

Living Dictionaries

Gretchen's thread on Living Dictionaries

Lingthusiasm bonus episode ‘Linguistic Advice - Challenging grammar snobs, finding linguistics community, accents in singing, and more’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[superlinguo]

Review: The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies

I have a long form review of the new Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies over on LINGUIST List. The handbook was published as I was signing off on final proofs of Gesture: A Slim guide. While I managed to sneak a few references into my own work, I was delighted to have the chance to read a review copy. You can read the full review on LINGUIST List.

Below are some excerpts:

The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies is a fitting encapsulation of the state of a relatively young, interdisciplinary field of enquiry. Alan Cienki has managed the difficult task of distilling the topic while also reflecting a well-curated range of methods, voices and perspectives. An understanding of the vital role of gesture in language is essential for any linguist who studies interaction, and this handbook provides a clear, authoritative introduction to key approaches. With 26 chapters and almost 700 pages, the Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies is a hefty tome, but not completely unmanageable. The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies is a welcome contribution, both as a summation of key insights from the field of Gesture Studies to date, and an indication of where there is scope for progress.

I am a big fan of LINGUIST List book reviews. It's a publication that's available to everyone, and I've relied on reviews to get a sense of the many wonderful books I don't have time to read. I've written a few over the years, and you can to! Just keep an eye on the monthly FOR REVIEW list.

Read my full review of The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies on LINGUIST List.

And, because it's basically the opposite (in the best way!) of what I was trying to achieve with the Slim Guide, here they are together:

[superlinguo]

New Commentary Paper: Open research requires open mindedness: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo [open access]

This new commentary article is a response to a target article from Laura Becker and Matías Guzmán Naranjo titled "Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology".

In this paper, Becker and Guzmán Naranjo explore what happens when typological work is reproduced by another team, and what the differences in results mean for the field of linguistic typology.

I wrote this article alongside my former co-chairs of Linguistic Data Interest Group (LDIG) of the Research Data Alliance, reflecting on the work needed to ensure that we are all doing the kind of research that is useful to a more transparent way of doing work in linguistic typology.

From the commentary:

We thank B&GN for their work, but we also thank Dryer (2018), Seržant (2021), Shcherbakova et al. (2023) and Berg (2020), for doing work that could be reproduced (a benchmark much scholarship falls short on) and subsequently having their work scrutinised and evaluated in this way. As B&GN note, “[t]here is no specific reason for choosing these papers other than the fact that the authors made their datasets available”. To work in an open and transparent manner is to open yourself to critical evaluation. Linguistic typology advances because of researchers who have created accessible data as part of their work. This includes individual researchers working on specific languages, whose data is the basis of typological work, as well as those typologists who share the databases of their work. Open ways of working require open mindedness from the whole research community.

Reference

Gawne, L., H.N. Andreassen, L. Ferrara, A.L. Berez-Kroeker (2025). Open research requires open mindedness: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo. Linguistic Typology. doi: 10.1515/lingty-2025-0018

Related links

Linguistic Data Interest Group: Five years of improving data citation practices in linguistics

New Paper: Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field

New Article Published: Reflections on reproducible research, in Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998

Adopting the Trømso Recommendations in academic publishing

[superlinguo]

Position Statement on Generative AI in teaching and research  

The Linguistics Discipline in the Department of Languages and Cultures at La Trobe University have developed a discipline-specific position statement on the role of generative AI in our classrooms. This statement was written to clearly communicate to our students our expectations of them and what they can expect from us.

Below is the introductory statement, which links to the full statement.

Linguistic subjects at La Trobe take a consistent approach to AI (particularly Generative AI and LLMs) for learning and teaching. Staff will generally limit their use of generative AI in teaching and research, and clearly communicate if such tools are used. We also encourage students to limit their use of AI for the sake of their own educational experience. Some limited use by students will be supported in specific circumstances. In all instances our use of AI in teaching and research is framed around critical evaluation of the utility of these technologies, as well as the cost and benefit of their use. For more information about this approach, including where Generative AI will be used in teaching and learning see the full statement. 

If you find this statement useful, please make use of it with your own students (and let us know how that goes!)

More on Gen AI:

Lingthusiasm Episode: Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. Bender

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna

Lingthusiasm Episode ‘Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane’

[superlinguo]

Episode 106: Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions

We asked you if a burrito was a sandwich, and you said 'no'. We asked you if ravioli was a sandwich and you said 'heck no'. We asked you if an ice cream sandwich was a sandwich and things...started to get a little murky. This isn't just a sandwich problem: you can also have similar arguments about what counts as a cup, a bird, a fish, furniture, art, and more! 

So wait...does any word mean anything anymore? Have we just broken language??  It's okay, linguistics has a solution! 

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about why deciding what's in and what's out of the definition of a word is so dang tricky, why people love to argue about it, and how prototype theory solves all the "is X a Y" arguments once and for all. 

Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 9: Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all. We’ve added an updated announcements section to the top and a few new things about prototypes and meaning to the end. We’re excited to share one of our favourite bonus episodes from Patreon with a broader audience, while at the same time giving everyone who works on the show a bit of a break.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about fictional gestures with Eric Molinsky, host of Imaginary Worlds, a podcast about sci-fi, fantasy and other genres of speculative fiction! We talk about the Vulcan salute from Star Trek, the Wakanda Forever salute from Black Panther, and the three-finger Hunger Games salute, and how all three have crossed over with additional symbolism into the real world. We also talk about gestures that have crossed over in the other direction, from the real-world origins of the Vulcan salute in a Jewish blessing, the two-finger blessing in the Foundation tv series from classical Latin and Greek oratory via Christian traditions, as well as religious gesture in the Penric and Desdemona series, smiles and shrugs in A Memory Called Empire, and more.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Original episode on Patreon: 'Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all'

Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'Liveshow Q and eh'

Wikipedia entry for 'Prototype Theory'

'Memes in Digital Culture' by Limor Shifman

Ann Leckie on Fangirl Happy Hour 

Jaffa cake: cake or biscuit? (UK)

Crostini: bread or biscuit? (Aus)

Tomato: fruit or vegetable?

cup vs. bowl vs. vase 

cup vs. mug 

No Such Thing as a Fish (podcast)

Wikipedia entry for 'Harlem Shake'

Wikipedia entry for 'Numa Numa'

Wikipedia entry for 'Gangnam Style'

Lingthusiasm episode 'Translating the untranslatable'

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[superlinguo]

Almost a decade later and there's a fun update to this paper!

Eight years after this original study Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow have a sequel.

The original paper showed that blind and sighted people who speak the same language have similar gestures to represent events. These gestures can't have been acquired through visual learning, so this was evidence that gesture and speech must be all bound up together in the brain. But there was still a question about how deeply they're tied together. Perhaps this was something that adults settled into as they got older.

In this new paper, Özçalışkan and team looked at the speech and gesture of blind and sighted Turkish children between the ages of five and ten years old. They used the same methods and targeted the same kind of action verbs and gestures. It's worth checking out the paper for the frolicking doll dioramas they set up as part of the experiment.

Even the youngest children showed the same kind of gesture patterns as adult Turkish speakers. This means that these kinds of patterns are part of language learning and not something that gets added on top later in life. That is further evidence for the original argument that speech and gesture are a package deal.

It's so great to see this team continuing to refine and support the original findings.

From the "research highlights" section of the paper:

Gestures, when produced with speech (i.e., co-speech gesture), follow language-specific patterns in event representation in both blind and sighted children.

Gestures, when produced without speech (i.e., silent gesture), do not follow the language-specific patterns in event representation in both blind and sighted children.

Language-specific patterns in speech and co-speech gestures are observable at the same time in blind and sighted children.

The cross-linguistic similarities in silent gestures begin slightly later in blind children than in sighted children.

Citation

Özçalışkan, Şeyda, Ché Lucero, and Susan Goldin‐Meadow. (2024). Is vision necessary for the timely acquisition of language‐specific patterns in co‐speech gesture and their lack in silent gesture?. Developmental Science, 27(5), e13507. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13507

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science, 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

[superlinguo]

Lingthusiasm Episode 105: Linguistics of TikTok - Interview with Adam Aleksic aka EtymologyNerd

TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are an evolving genre of media: short-form, vertical videos that take up your whole screen and are served to you from an algorithm rather than who you follow. This changes how people talk in them compared to earlier forms of video, and linguists are on it!

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about the linguistics of tiktok with Adam Aleksic, better known on social media as etymologynerd. We talk about how Adam got his start into linguistics via etymology, the process that he goes through to make his current videos get the attention of people and algorithms, and how different forms of media (like podcasts vs shortform video) relate differently to their audiences. We also talk about the challenges of writing a book about language on the internet when it changes so fast, comparing the writing process for Adam's upcoming book Algospeak with Gretchen's book Because Internet.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In celebration of our 100th bonus episode we've decided to go back into the vault and revisit our very first bonus episode - with updated sweary commentary! We've made this extra bonus bonus version available to all patrons, free and paid, so feel free to send it to your friends!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about your linguistics questions! In honour of our 100th bonus episode of Lingthusiasm, and because our first advice episode was so popular, here's another episode answering your advice questions, from the serious to the silly!

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Adam Aleksic's website

etymologynerd on TikTok, Instagram, and Substack

Algospeak by Adam Aleksic

'Where Do Memes Come From? The Top Platforms From 2010-2022' by Aidan Walker for Know Your Meme

Lingthusiasm episode 'Emoji are Gesture Because Internet'

Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch

'It’s Complicated - The Social Lives of Networked Teens' by Danah Boyd (pdf)

Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'Words from your family: Familects!'

'Language and the Internet' by David Crystal (2001)

Lingthusiasm episode 'Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. Bender'

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[superlinguo]

A Decade of Lingwiki: An informal history

Lingwiki is the name used for an informal network of people and events with the aim of improving the representation of linguistics on Wikipedia. Whether it’s people sharing their edits via a hashtag, informal online editing events, or dedicated workshops and catered edit-a-thons, lingwiki aims to improve linguistic contributions to the open access encyclopedia, which is the largest reference work in history. 

2025 marks ten years of lingwik. I like round numbers, documenting informal histories and lingwiki, and so I wanted to celebrate this anniversary by sharing the parts of the lingwiki story I am familiar with. I link to Gretchen’s All Things Linguistic blog posts about lingwiki throughout this post, but you can read them all here too.

The first lingwiki event was held at the Linguistic Society of America’s (LSA) 2015 Annual Meeting in January 2015. This event was run by Gretchen McCulloch. Gretchen was heading towards the end of her MA and thought this event would be a good opportunity to both get involved in the LSA and improve the quality of public information about linguistics. Gretchen had some experience with editing Wikipedia, but realised that improving the quality of linguistics content was a task too daunting for one individual, and that a better investment of her time would be increasing the number of linguistically knowledgeable volunteers with editing skills who could contribute.

Prior to the first lingwiki event, in August 2014 Gretchen ran an online call for people to edit key linguistics pages of Wikipedia, a project she called Crowdsourced Linguistics. I participated, with a longer blog post on ergativity and edits to the Ergativity page on Wikipedia. During this online exercise, it became apparent that people were interested in editing, but wanted more training and support (technical and moral). Wikipedia edit-a-thons were an existing model Gretchen could emulate in a space for linguists, and she’d had experience attending a couple of Art+Feminism edit-a-thons in Montreal. Having many people in the same space (physical or digital) to collaboratively edit Wikipedia has many advantages: there’s help to get new editors set up, people around to help you troubleshoot any advanced editing problems, models for new ways of helping to improve linguistic content, and a sense of camaraderie. Events also help people who are willing editors, but struggle to set aside the time in busy schedules to do the work. At the time, Brice Russ worked at the LSA in PR, and reached out to Gretchen to talk about how the LSA could support this project. That's how the first in-person edit-a-thon came to be at LSA. The fact that LSA were able to comp Gretchen’s registration also made a difference to helping a junior person who was new to lingcomm attend LSA.  

Changing the name from Crowdsourced Linguistics to lingwiki for the first in-person event made the aims clearer, and #lingwiki was a useful tag for social media spaces. It is also an early example of Gretchen’s knack for branding linguistics projects. In keeping with the networks she had, alongside the LSA in-person event, Gretchen also reached out to other online lingcomm creators to run parallel events. I was in Singapore at the time, and ran an event for staff and students at Nanyang Technological University the same week, and also monitored Twitter traffic during the LSA event. I had some experience with editing Wikipedia, but these lingwiki events were the first time I committed to systematically improving and creating articles with an understanding of the processes and policies of editing on the platform. The benefit of these events is that they attract many new to editing Wikipedia, but also some people with experience, so that there’s support beyond the main facilitator. 

The first lingwiki not only served as a model of this kind of event for linguists, but also for the kinds of editing work that Wikipedia needed, and very much still needs. There were four main types of editing work laid out in the slides. The first type of editing is improving stubs. Stubs are short articles where the page has been created but there’s very little information. WikiProject Linguistics estimates there are over 2,600 linguistics stubs. This is twice as many as there were in 2015, since it’s a lot easier to start a page than to edit it up to a level of quality, but they’re also a great place to start since any additions will be an improvement. The second type of editing is improving the description of the majority of the world’s languages. All languages with an ISO 639-3 code have an automatically generated Wikipedia page, but many of the world’s languages, even those with descriptive grammars to reference are still stubs. The third type of editing is translating posts from one language to another. There are many stubs on English Wikipedia, but there are 341 other currently active languages, many with even less linguistics than the English Wikipedia. If you have the skills, translation from one Wikipedia to another is an excellent way to get linguistics topics to new audiences. The fourth type of editing is creating or improving biographies of linguists, especially those in demographics that are under-represented on Wikipedia.

Thanks to Rose-Marie Dechaine at the first lingwiki, Gretchen learnt about the process of applying for grants from WikiMedia to run events. This allowed Gretchen to run events in 2015 and 2016 including at the LSA Summer Institute in Chicago. From 2017-2021 Gretchen collected feedback from participants for events that she ran. Across a range of online and in person events at conferences, summer schools and universities the survey was filled in 242 times. Participants improved pages across a wide range of topics in linguistics, and mainly worked on stubs (40%), biographies (29%) and underdocumented languages (25%). Over half of participants had never edited Wikipedia before, but over three quarters (77%) of participants were keen to continue to participate in ongoing edit-a-thon events and almost two thirds (62%) were open to continuing to edit even without events. For people at these events, it was the first lingwiki for 81% of survey respondents. When it comes to lingwiki participants, the majority were grad students (46%), followed by undergrads (18%), profs (14%) and non-academic linguists (9%), a reflection of the kinds of venues where these events were run. 

The original slide deck from the first event has been enriched and translated over the years, but still lives at bit.ly/lingwiki. Lingwiki became a staple of the LSA annual conference schedule (Gretchen’s reports from 2016, 2017). When I moved to the UK we ran monthly lingwiki events at SOAS from 2015-2017 (with a pizza budget thanks to WikiMedia). Off the back of the positive reception for lingwiki, LSA has become a partner of WikiMedia, with quite a few linguists using Wikipedia editing as a practical classroom project across a range of linguistics courses. Gretchen and I ran workship on Wikis and Wikipedia for Endangered Languages, and several editing events, at the language documentation summer school CoLang 2016 in Fairbanks Alaska. More recently, the LSA Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics (COGEL) has been running edit-a-thons for the last five years with the targeted aim of improving the diversity of Wikipedia biographies, and the LSA Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics (COZIL) have run Pride Month edit-a-thons too. Sunny Ananthanarayan, one of the organisers of the COZIL events was joining lingwiki events before even starting linguistics undergrad studies, one of the many lovely examples over the years of lingwiki being a self-propagating collection of events thanks to an enthusiastic and engaged linguistics community.   

I have spent a lot of my editing time on a couple of key topics. I started with a focus on improving the biographies of Australian linguists, especially women. Around the time we were at CoLang I also made sure that language pages linked to relevant archives, cross-linking all of the languages in PARADISEC and Kaipuleohone at the time. The page I have worked on most extensively is the Yolmo language page, a Tibetan language in Nepal that was the topic of my PhD research. I also published a version of the work on that page as a WikiJournal of Humanities paper, which has been a useful way to translate the time spent editing Wikipedia into something legible to my institution, in much the same way handbook chapters are.  

Lingwiki has been an important thread across the years I was a precariously employed and often uprooted early career researcher. It’s the first project Gretchen and I schemed on, and the reason we got to meet in person for the first time at CoLang in Alaska. This is very much the history of lingwiki as I see it, but as someone who is used to editing Wikipedia, I’m also used to valuing the contribution of many others as well, and I’m sure there are people who have taken lingwiki and made it their own in their institutions, organisations and classrooms. Neither Gretchen nor I get the chance to run edit-a-thons very often anymore. I use Wikipedia as an informal learning activity across a number of subjects. I also made edits occasionally. I still believe it’s one of the most powerful ways all linguists can improve public understanding of linguistics. 

You can edit Wikipedia using the lingwiki slides as a quick-start guide, or you can use the slides to run your own editing events. With the internet becoming more of a series of closed off social media gardens, and the ever-present problems with the reliability of information online, Wikipedia feels like a more important resource than ever. Improving Wikipedia is one of the best, enduring ways for you to positively improve public knowledge about your topics of linguistic interest.  

Lingwiki slides: https://bit.ly/lingwiki 

[superlinguo]

Bonus 100.5: Our very first swearing bonus episode, now unlocked!

In this bonus bonus episode, extra special bonus edition from the vault, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about our first sweary episode! We talk about real swears and words that may look or sound like swear words in one language but are completely innocuous in another (such as the mysteriously English-sweary word for "seal" in several European languages), the semantic bleaching of words like "sucks" and "rawdogging", the experimentally-tested difference between swears and slurs, and how swearing can help if you (literally) find yourself in hot water.

This episode originally aired as our very first bonus episode in 2017, and in honour of our 100th bonus episode in 2025 we've made this version of it with updated sweary commentary available to all patrons, free and paid, so feel free to send it to your friends! Drop your favourite sweary facts in the comments below for others to enjoy.

Regular bonus episodes (and our entire back catalogue of 100 bonus episodes) are available for patrons at the Ling-thusiast tier or higher or you can purchase a one-time collection of all our book-themed bonus episodes or all our spiciest bonus episodes (including much more swearing), but we're also really happy when people just give us their email address to get occasional updates as free members, so sometimes we'll give you surprise perks like this one! Listen to this episode about real and pseudo-swears for free by giving us a your email address on Patreon.

[superlinguo]

Micro-patronage for research communication: the Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study of a sustainable funding model (new research article)

For the last eight years of making Lingthusiasm we have relied on the financial support of patrons to crowdfund the production of the show. I've occasionally shared the logistics of this at workshops or in mentoring meetings, but I have been wanting to share more of the motivation, benefits and challenges of this model for research communicators. The internet can be a magical place for connecting with audiences for specific topics, where any one single physical location might not have the depth of audience to make that content viable.

For this paper I had the good fortune to work with Jonathan O’Donnell, whose PhD thesis was all about public funding of research and research communication. It was conversations with Jonathan that helped me clarify that in all of the choices we had made about funding Lingthusiasm the clearest thread was sustainability. Lingthusiasm works because it is financially and intellectually sustainable for our production team, and for our audience. It was a joy to work on this article, and I hope it's useful for other scicomm or niche content creators, as well as offering a bit of an insight into some of the choices we've made for Lingthusiasm.

Abstract

Micro-patronage provides a new model of funding for research communication. This article uses the Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study to describe how micro-patronage can work and some of the benefits and challenges involved. The authors draw on their own experience of micro-patronage to demonstrate how to create sustainable projects. They also discuss how it sits alongside university funding structures, while also providing a measure of independence from those structures.

Citation

Gawne, Lauren, and Jonathan O’Donnell. (2025). Micro-patronage for research communication: The Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study of a sustainable funding model. Journal of Science Communication 24(03). DOI: 10.22323/146620250609102339

[superlinguo]

Lingthusiasm Episode 104: Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski

When we talk about language reclamation, we often think about oral traditions. But at this point, many Indigenous languages also have considerable written traditions, and engaging with writing as part of teaching these languages to children is important for all of the same reasons as we teach writing in majoritarian languages.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about multilingual literacy with Dr. Hanna-Máret Outakoski, who’s a professor of Sámi languages at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, Norway. We talk about growing up with a mix of Northern Sámi, Finnish, Norwegian, and English, as well as how Hanna-Máret got into linguistics and shifted her interests from more formal to more community-based work, such as "language showers" and the role of play in language learning. We also talk about the long history of literature in Sámi, from joiks written down as early as the 1500s to how people are still joiking today (including on Eurovision), and how teaching kids writing can strengthen oral traditions.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the linguistics of kissing]! We talk about the technical phonetics terms for kissing (bilabial clicks...plus the classic ling student quadrilabial clicks joke) as well as how different cultures taxonomize types of kissing (the Roman osculum/basium/suavium distinction is still pretty useful!). We also talk about how toddlers acquire the "blow a kiss" gesture, how couples time their kisses around their sentences, and many ways of representing kissing in writing, such as xx, xoxo, and emoji.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. If you join before July 1st you'll get a sticker of a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox! There’s a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see how many items you can recognize!

We're also running a poll for current patreon supports to vote on the final sticker design! This sticker will go out to everyone who’s a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher as of July 1st, 2025.

We’re also hoping that this sticker special offer encourages people to join and stick around as we need to do an inflation-related price increase at the Lingthusiast level. Our coffee hasn’t cost us five bucks in a while now, and we need to keep paying the team who enables us to keep making the show amid our other linguistics prof-ing and writing jobs.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Hanna-Máret Outakoski (university profile)

'Developing Literacy Research in Sápmi' by Hanna Outakoski

'Giellariššu: Indigenous language revitalisation in the city' by Hanna-Máret Outakoski and Øystein A. Vangsnes (language showers)

'An introduction to joik' by Juhán Niila Stålka

Wikipedia entry for 'Joik'

Sami voices / Sáme jiena (for more information on the archiving of joiks)

'Developing Literacy Research in Sápmi' by Hanna Outakoski

'Conceptualizing fireside dialogues as gulahallan' by Hanna-Máret Outakoski

'What is indigenous research methodology?' paper on Relational Accountability by Shawn Wilson

Northern Oral Language And Writing Through Play

Lingthusiasm episode 'Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas'

Lingthusiasm episode 'Connecting with oral culture'

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[superlinguo]

Immortal Gestures, Damon Young (review)

Damon Young brings his keenly-honed attention to the topic of gesture, and its role in the texture of being human as part of the philosophical detail of life. Young focuses specifically on gestures that have a fixed meaning for a group of users. The category of emblems is a rich topic of exploration, although I am a highly biased reviewer because they are a category of gesture to which I’ve also given a lot of thought. As Young marvels, "[t]hese signs are fluid, subtle; they are finely suited to situations."

Each of the fifteen chapters focuses on one gesture, the author's relationship to it as well as what it can tell us about culture, history, religion and so much more. The shrug is an opportunity to ponder the theological question of whether God shrugs, the finger guns are a launch point for a discussion of gun culture, and the salute at the beginning of a fencing match is an opportunity to ponder class and gallantry.

Young uses a depth of research, but with a light touch; he mentions in passing the shrug is a recurrent gesture, while (sensibly) sidestepping the complex relationship between recurrent gestures and emblems as categories. The conversational introduction to key references, rather than a performatively detailed set of formal citations, suits the cosy, conversational tones.

The book is a very pretty, petite, 200 page hardcover, with striking blue cover art by Angi Thomas.

I apologise I am bad at online influencing - I probably should have taken a photo of the cover before this copy lived in my bag for a few days while I read it..

Young’s selection of gestures is wide ranging, including some classic, prototypical emblems (the ‘horns’, the Vulcan salute, the shush), as well as opportunities to push into ritualistic or stylistic actions, including the plié of ballet, taking off a hood (a recurring motif in Star Wars) and slack-mouthed miming life as a goldfish in a bowl. Each short chapter takes its own journey while weaving into a larger set of themes. I enjoyed Young delighting in the observation of actions typically taken for granted, and their storied histories. At one point he marvels “[b]ut I was very much in the world" - capturing the wonderful transition into a way of seeing that comes with paying attention to the gestures of our lives. 

Purchase Links

Damon Young, Immortal Gestures (Scribe, 2025)

Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Amazon (affiliate link)

Scribe (publisher page)

[superlinguo]

In praise of niche papers

Mark Dingemanse's blog post "In praise of niche papers" is a lovely way to share academic influences. It got me thinking about some of my favourite papers that I love and cite, and which I'm always surprised to see aren't as highly cited as some other work by these authors. So, to follow Mark's lead, here are two niche papers that are very close to my heart:

Kendon, Adam. (1978). ‘Differential perceptual and attentional frame in face-to-face interaction: two problems for investigation’, Semiotica, 24/3/4: 305–15.

Adam Kendon's contribution to the Gesture Studies literature spans four decades and many of his research papers are foundational texts across a range of topics. This is one of Kendon's least cited works. It's also one of the earliest experiments on gesture perception I've come across. Kendon used a film projector and played a speech by a speaker of Enga in Papua New Guinea to a group of English speakers, looking at what people attend to in gestures. It was the model we used for Gawne and Kelly (2014) (discussed below).

Hostetter, Autumn B., Martha W. Alibali, and Sheree M. Schrager. (2011). ‘If you don’t already know, I’m certainly not going to show you!: Motivation to communicate affects gesture production’. G. Stam and M. Ishino (eds), Integrating Gestures, pp. 61–74. John Benjamins.

I love this experiment so much: people gesture the same amount if they're doing an activity helping or competing with someone, but the size and usefulness of the gestures are different. If you're competing against someone your gestures are smaller and less informative. People, so sneaky. I absolutely made sure to get a reference to this into Gesture: A Slim Guide.

Mark suggested in his post that people share niche papers from their own research. Here are two of my favourite papers of mine that aren't cited that much, but made me very happy to have out in the world:

Gawne, Lauren, and Barbara F. Kelly. (2014). Revisiting “Significant Action” and gesture classification. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 34/2: 216–33.

This was the first research project I ever run, and (imo) a nifty modern replication of Kendon (1978) discussed above. People generally agree with Gesture Studies researchers on the minimum definition of what a gesture is, but they ascribe communicative intent to a much wider range of actions. Also, I did this research back in 2007 as my honours thesis project, but it took us another seven years to get this through to publication.

Gawne, Lauren, Barbara F. Kelly, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, and Tyler Heston. (2017). Putting practice into words: The state of data and methods transparency in grammatical descriptions. Language Documentation & Conservation, 11: 157–89.

This project surveyed 100 descriptive grammars: 50 published grammars and 50 PhD dissertations. There's lots of good work about how we should go about doing descriptive grammar work, but very little of this is actively discussed or described in the genre of published works. It's been almost a decade since we published this work. I'd like to think that people aren't citing it because they're just quietly improving the way they talk about methods and data in their descriptive grammar writing.

[superlinguo]

Transcript Episode 104: Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Dr. Hanna-Máret Outakoski, who’s a professor of Sámi languages at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, Norway. She’s a native speaker of Northern Sámi and Finnish and fluent speaker of Swedish. She can read German and uses English mainly for academic publishing purposes. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about multilingual literacy.

But first, some announcements! We’ve commissioned a jazzed up version of the Lingthusiasm logo with fun little doodles in the classic shape of the Lingthusiasm squiggle adorning your podcast reader right now – now filled in with some linguistics and Lingthusiasm references in little, tiny doodles. See how many you can spot! We’re gonna be sending out a sticker with this new design to everyone who’s a patron at the Ling-thusiast level and higher as of July 1, 2025. If you wanna get this sticker that can adore your laptop, water bottle, and help maybe connect you to other people who are enthusiastic about linguistics, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm. If you just wanna see a version of this sticker and see how many of the little doodles you can identify, you can go to lingthusiasm.com or @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. We’ll be posting about it a lot. Our artist, Lucy Maddox, did a really great job, and we’re so excited to share this design with you.

Our most recent bonus episode was about the linguistics of kissing from the physical articulation of kisses – which involves the mouth, much like many linguistic things – as well as the social significance of kissing in various ways, various times to various classes of people, to writing kisses as Xs and with emoji. All of that and 98 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm help keep the show going.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Hanna-Máret, welcome to the show.

Hanna-Máret: Hi!

Gretchen: It’s so nice to have you here.

Hanna-Máret: It’s really good to be here.

Gretchen: We’re gonna get into more of your work later, but let’s start with the question that we ask all of our guests, which is, “How did you get interested in linguistics?”

Hanna-Máret: I grew up in a multilingual region in northern Finland that’s as far north in Europe as one can get. In my childhood, most people living there, they knew my Indigenous heritage language (that’s Northern Sámi), and they also spoke either Finnish or Norwegian or both. We also learned a lot of English in school and through TV. My home was also right at the border of Finland and Norway. There was only a river marking the state border. Some languages float quite freely in that region. For many people, knowing languages was quite natural. Most people didn’t think so much about the languages, but my father was always talking about some linguistic traits or challenges or other matters. He was a special teacher and had always had an interest in languages and for linguistics. His language enthusiasm spread into my life very early. He also read to me and encouraged me to read a lot in different languages, and then we used to talk about the literature afterwards. I was also really fascinated by the language knowledge and cultural knowledge that my Sámi relatives had, although most of them were not academics. The Sámi speakers in the generation before mine were actually the last ones to grow up speaking mainly Sámi. Their language was so beautiful and so effortless. I decided quite young that I would pursue a career working with my heritage language and do my best to support its survival.

Gretchen: That led you into linguistics.

Hanna-Máret: Yeah, but first I considered a career as a translator or interpreter. I actually got a basic training in that also. But I worked as an interpreter mostly just to make some money so that I could continue studying at the university. I studied Sámi, Finnish, linguistics, pedagogy, and I got a bachelor’s degree in Sámi language. Some of my professors then encouraged me to reach for the master’s degree and then continue with the PhD.

Gretchen: Did you go right into Sámi language revitalisation work, or were you doing more academic stuff?

Hanna-Máret: Well, my first attempt with the PhD was actually in formal linguistics. I was working on reflexivity and reciprocity in Sámi and this more specifically with Government and Binding Theory, which had, at that time, not yet lost its glory. I actually never finished the thesis. Instead, my teaching responsibilities grew every year, and I started noticing that I was more interested in the use of language than in some isolated syntactic structure. I don’t want anyone to get me wrong here. I’m really grateful for having acquired a base in formal linguistics since it has given me the tools not only to describe my language but also to problematise and solve some issues that our traditional, prescriptive grammars in some languages are not able to explain. It’s just that, at some point, I started thinking more about the work that was needed to keep the language in daily use and not just the structures.

Gretchen: But you have a doctorate now. You went back and did something else?

Hanna-Máret: My second attempt to finish the doctoral degree was, happily, a bit more successful, and I get the chance to gather texts written by multilingual Sámi children in three countries. Me and my colleagues, we used something that’s called “keystroke logging” to trace the ways our writers express their thoughts and ideas in three languages. I really found that project very inspiring, although it also showed me how challenging it can be to work with schools and pupils. After that PhD, I got a chance to do my postdoctoral studies within applied linguistics and educational sciences.

Gretchen: Three languages – that would be Sámi, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish? That’s four.

Hanna-Máret: I was in three countries. It was the majority language of all the countries. In Finland, Finnish; in Sweden, Swedish; and in Norway Norwegian. All the kids here in Nordic countries also study English, so that was the third language.

Gretchen: Okay. The third language depending on the country they did – yeah. Did you bring all of these different backgrounds together?

Hanna-Máret: I think that all of the steps on the way there have been really important for me. I’m not a nerdy expert in any given subject, but I have gotten a lot of experience from different fields, which actually is a necessity when working with literacy development in a revitalisation context.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that’s really interesting about language revitalisation work is that it draws, really, on all of the different areas of linguistics.

Hanna-Máret: That’s true. I moved away from that personal academic interest and those long days in the office analysing some specific language structures and then moved toward research that actually comes from the needs and the interests of the language community. I think that I still steer all of my projects toward the field that I mastered the best, whether it be literacy development or language didactics or teaching of languages in virtual environments and worlds. That’s only so that I can do my best in the project that I initiated in collaboration with, for example, Sámi language teachers.

Gretchen: If they want to have some aspect of the grammar explained to them, then your training in formal linguistics can help you do that.

Hanna-Máret: It can do that. I also feel that all my knowledge – I don’t want to lose that. I steer the project – even though I want them to be initiated by the teachers – but I tell them, “Well, these are the fields that I know best, so can we do something together within these fields?”

Gretchen: That makes sense. It’s a collaboration. I wanna maybe back up a little bit because I’m from Canada; I don’t know all of the details about Sámi languages. You mentioned already that they’re spoken in three countries. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about Sámi languages and how they relate to other languages in the area.

Hanna-Máret: There are several Sámi languages and also Sámi groups living in a quite big geographical area. It stretches from the middle of Scandinavia in Norway and Sweden over to over the northernmost Finland, and all the way to Kola Peninsula in Russia. It’s a huge area. Many Sámi still live in their traditional home settlement regions, but many have also moved within the traditional home region. For example, I live now in a bigger city in Sweden that is also included in Sámi, but I come from a little Sámi village located at the border of Norway and Finland. I also know that a large group of Sámi live in the bigger cities in the outskirts of Sámi and also in the capital cities of Nordic countries.

Gretchen: And there are several Sámi languages?

Hanna-Máret: The common understanding at the moment is that there are still nine surviving languages, but actually, the situation of the smallest languages on the Russian side of Sámi, that is not the land of the Sámi people, it is quite uncertain. All of the smaller Sámi languages are really extremely vulnerable to changes in speaker networks. All Sámi languages are endangered.

Gretchen: For you, which of these Sámi languages are you closer to?

Hanna-Máret: I have a special relationship with the language that I speak myself. That is Northern Sámi or North Sámi. It is the largest of the Sámi languages, but exactly how many speakers there are, that is unknown. I don’t know how many people there are. This is due to the restrictions in keeping statistics over ethnicity and minority languages in Sweden and Norway. What we do know with certainty is the number of children who are studying Sámi languages in compulsory school in the four countries. That number is actually well under 4,000 individuals. More than half of them are studying Sámi as a second language or as a separate subject in school. Only less than one-third of the pupils have Sámi as their main language of instruction. All of those pupils who study everything in Sámi, and they live either in Norway or in Finland, not in Sweden or in Russia. I think that that language situation of the school-age children serves as a quite good mirror of the rapid changes in demography and language shift among my people.

Gretchen: There’s no Sámi language school in Sweden or in Russia?

Hanna-Máret: We have Sámi schools in Sweden, but even there, the Sámi language is a subject, and they do have some other school subjects also taught in Sámi, but not fully. I was very lucky. I went to school where all of my – everything from biology to mathematics, everything – was taught in Sámi. I was very happy and lucky that I grew up in the Finnish Sámi.

Gretchen: In Canada, we have these French immersion schools where all of the subjects are in French, but the students are generally English-speaking. People have been quite excited about them, but now that the first generations have gone through the French immersion schools, they come out and they sort of speak French, but they also don’t necessarily speak French the way someone who used French in everyday life speaks French. Do the kids come out speaking Sámi?

Hanna-Máret: Well, I think, like you said, it depends a lot if they get it at home, if they have it in their free time. There are still children who come from Sámi homes where they hear it in their everyday life and not only in school. For those children, I think that it’s really, really good to be able to study the language, also, as a subject in school. But I have also seen that it’s not a guarantee that they will learn Sámi even though they go to so-called “Sámi” schools. They need support at home and everywhere and not only in school.

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. You’ve worked a lot on teaching writing and literacy in the Sámi context. How does that interact with speaking and with the work in the schools?

Hanna-Máret: Even though my research focus is on teaching and learning writing in the Sámi context, I would not want to compare or separate speaking and listening and writing from each other. What I mean is that all of those skills are needed in literacy development. I think that my own teaching methods, they always combine all the three all the time. But what I’ve seen in my school research projects is that writing in Sámi is often left with the least attention in the primary schooling of Sámi children. I’ve also seen that there are great differences between the countries. Finland is globally known for extensive reading and writing instruction. The education of Sámi children in Finland includes more writing than, for example, the education of the Sámi in Sweden.

Gretchen: What do you think is the way that you prefer going about it?

Hanna-Máret: Well, I always promote language didactics that has a more balanced take on the teaching of different language skills. I think that the imbalance that I’ve noted in my projects, it really risks leading into a situation where the coming generations will no longer be able to withhold the literacy traditions of the Sámi society. I’ve also seen that many times people are hostages of their own language beliefs or ideologies. This mantra about Sámi languages being oral languages, that is outdated, but it’s also very regularly used by the Sámi themselves. Many people, therefore, believe that written language threatens the oral traditions when it, of course, in fact, can strengthen those and other traditions, too. We are still in a hegemonic situation where we have these kind of ideas that Sámi has been a spoken language in the history, and it should be like that forever.

Gretchen: What are some of the literary traditions of Sámi society?

Hanna-Máret: There are really, really old Sámi joiks. They look almost like poems – very beautiful poems that are already in the 1500s they were written down. We have this long tradition, and we have even a lot of religious texts that were written in Sámi and novels that came in the beginning of the 1900s. But there have been books for teaching and that kind of thing. We have had possibilities to teach and learn writing, but it has never been part of the school system before. That came much later.

Gretchen: Having children who are learning Sámi in school to be able to connect with those historic literary texts as well seems really interesting and important.

Hanna-Máret: Yeah, well, I’m not sure if the kids are so interested in that kind of literature. I’m not sure about that. [Laughs]

Gretchen: Yeah, maybe something from the 1500s is less interesting to modern-day children, that’s true. Maybe when they get a bit older some of them might be interested.

Hanna-Máret: I think the oldest poems are really, really beautiful. It’s so nice to think that people have had this tradition of making joiks and really beautiful love poems. I dunno if the young kids like that so much, but they might

Gretchen: A ���joik” is a kind of poem?

Hanna-Máret: “Joik” – it’s part of our song tradition. There’re joiks that don’t have so many words, but there’re also long joiks that have almost epic stories that are being told about the history and so on. We have had that. It is also something that is vanishing that the moment – joik traditions – not so many people know how to do it anymore and not so many people know the old joiks. But there are still some really good people who know that.

Gretchen: That sounds really cool. Is it more of a private community thing, or are there people who put them on YouTube or something like that?

Hanna-Máret: Well, it’s not like – I’ve learned that in Canada there’re some groups that it’s very sacred knowledge, the singing knowledge, but in the Sámi society, we have some special joiks that they are given. We “joik” people. We don’t “joik” about them. Some of them are private within families, but most of them, like, for example, there’re very nice animal joiks, and we joik even the animals, and we joik also, for example, the mountains and the waters. When you’re joiking them, you give them a musical substance, so they become alive in the music. Those are shared within society. They are open. There are even archives where you can go and listen to some of these.

Gretchen: Oh, cool, maybe we can link to one or two examples of those if people wanna go see in the show notes. I think we’re answering some of these questions already, but do you wanna talk any more about why teaching and learning writing is important in this Indigenous language context?

Hanna-Máret: I think that maybe the best and the shortest answer to this question is very simple. It is for the same reasons as writing in any language. Writing is a way of remembering, describing, and imagining. Today, writing skills are also needed for full participation in the democratic society. Writing and reading in, for example, North Sámi, makes it possible to take part in the trans-Nordic Sámi society. Teaching and learning writing, it happens most often in schools and, thus, having access to writing instruction and writing opportunities in school is really crucial for the development of Indigenous literacy. Of course, there are a number of factors that can hinder the process of learning and teaching Indigenous children to write and read in their own languages. In Sámi we are faced with many problems, but mainly three kinds of challenges. Those are either connected to the shortness of human resources, or shortness of adequate teaching materials, or to the shortness of teaching hours, or all of them in some combination. The reasons for promoting teaching and learning of writing are the same between people and languages. That’s what I think, at least. But the available human material resources might differ as might the width and the breadth of writing opportunities. There are internal and external ideologies and language attitudes that often value writing in a majority language a lot higher than writing in Indigenous languages. We still have to remember that there are really no – analphabetic – or “illiterate” over 6-year-old Sámi people today. We all can read and write in our respective majority languages, but most Sámi are actually insecure about writing in their own heritage language. Many have never even been taught how to do it.

Gretchen: Reading and writing skills don’t – even though Sámi uses the same alphabet, I think, as Norwegian and Finnish and so on – at least I’ve never seen it written with a different alphabet.

Hanna-Máret: We have some special letters in North Sámi. Also, the problem is that most of the Sámi languages – the Sámi languages don’t share the same orthography. We don’t write our languages the same, which is a problem. North Sámi has its own special letters. South Sámi they do it in a different way. It also is something that makes it a bit complex and difficult.

Gretchen: But even if people know the alphabet already or most of the alphabet without depending on the special letters, that doesn’t mean that the skill of reading and writing necessarily transfers automatically to another language. You also have to have training in practicing using it.

Hanna-Máret: Exactly. There are so many special traits in North Sámi. For example, we have a gradation – consonant gradation – which makes it quite difficult. You really need to have training in how to write so that you get things right.

Gretchen: What do you mean by “consonant gradation”?

Hanna-Máret: For example, if we have a subject that is in nominative, then it has different consonants in the middle of the word than it would in the accusative (in one of the scripts). You have to even keep track of the consonants in the words. It’s a complicated system. It’s not always so intuitive for the kids, I have to say.

Gretchen: Maybe this explains – I’ve usually seen Sámi written with a double A, but I’ve noticed in your work that you write it with an A with an acute accent mark on it, just a single A. Are these different variations between different Sámi languages?

Hanna-Máret: Northern Sámi speakers, we call the native land “Sápmi.” The Sámi people call them “Sámit” or “Sápmelaš,” and the language is called “Sámegiella,” the Sámi language. All of these Sámi language groups, they have quite close variants of the name spelt slightly different ways in each language and at least three different spellings of Sámi language used in English sources. Those are the ones that you said “Saami” with two As. There is also a “Sami” with only one A, and the one that I use that is “Sámi” with an A acute, which is the spelling of my own language. I think that the two-A variant, it’s more often seen in sources that originate from Finland. The one-A variant is often used by non-Sámi academics outside Finland. The last variant is then very often used by North Sámi academics, so that’s why I use it also. I have also many times been forced into using the one A variant since the journal or the book publishers that have the English that they want to have, they prefer that variant.

Gretchen: It seems like the variant with just one A – because it is a long vowel. That’s what both the double A and the acute accent is trying to convey is that it’s /saami/ not /sami/.

Hanna-Máret: Yeah, exactly.

Gretchen: Just having the single A with no accent or anything doesn’t convey that.

Hanna-Máret: No. Because you could say /sami/, too. It’s only /sami/, and it doesn’t sound good for us.

Gretchen: It would be a different word or something, yeah.

Hanna-Máret: Of course, if you’re looking at older sources, then you would find the pejorative and outdated term “Lappish” for the language and “Lapps” for the people. Those are no longer okay to use. Otherwise, I would not want to say to anyone else which of the Sámi spellings they should choose. If I’m allowed, then I always prefer the A acute variant that is closest to my own language.

Gretchen: Sounds good. We’re gonna use the A acute variant in this interview because that’s what you use. Do you have any other fun facts about Sámi language or grammar that you’d like to share?

Hanna-Máret: Well, I’ll go with a really hardcore linguistic fact about Sámi languages. Sámi languages have a negation that agrees with the subject in person and number. In the traditional Sámi grammars, it has also, therefore, often been categorised as a verb, although it at least, in the generative tradition, would rather be a functional head of a negation phrase. In Southern Sámi, the negation can also carry tempus – like time morphology – if there’s no auxiliary that can do that job. That has been considered even better proof of the negation being a verb. However, the Southern Sámi is a so-called “affix hopping” language that leaves the main verb in the verb phrase, while Northern Sámi always needs some verb to occupy the head of the tempus phrase and can never show time on negation. But these kind of things, when you’re looking at the traditional grammars, you don’t get the explanation to these things. Then people just have to decide, “Well, how do we categorise negation if we don’t look at the structures that could be behind these things?” And then you get these labels that just don’t feel quite right.

Gretchen: It seems like, “Okay, is this a verb? Is this not a verb?” could be an interesting position for learners to find themselves in of like, “What am I trying to learn here?” That’s an academic or formal linguistic approach to looking at Sámi grammar. You also have this paper about applying Indigenous methodologies to literacy. Do you wanna say a bit more about what you mean by “Indigenous methodologies” in this context or how they relate to literacy?

Hanna-Máret: Well, I guess that in that paper I actually highlighted that we are still missing those robots – the Indigenous methodologies in the field of literacy research. As long as we don’t have any specific Indigenous methodologies, we may be forced to continue using at least some of the Western data gathering methods and analysing methods. I think the main point of that paper was really to show that, also, literacy research should try to follow as many of the Indigenous research principles as possible, even when the methods are still on their way and being developed and not there yet. In that way, it is possible to keep some of the Western methodology also in Indigenous literacy contexts but, at the same time, make sure that we do not do any harm and that we try to make research relevant, also, for the language communities that collaborate with.

Gretchen: You’re seeing it as a combination of the best parts of both worlds or just working with what we have at this point.

Hanna-Máret: I guess. Maybe I’m a bit of a pragmatic researcher in the way that I do not wish to turn my back on methods are part of well known Western methodologies if they work for the thing that I want to do. But I just want to find ways to make the research relevant for the participants. I guess that that’s why the word “collaboration” is so central for my own personal research designs, sometimes to the point that I’d actually rather be out there in the field supporting and helping to develop Indigenous and minority pedagogy rather than really producing academic papers that are rarely actually read by our Sámi participants. I’m not saying how other people should do or how they should feel; I’m just telling what it feels like to be a speaker and a researcher of a highly endangered language. I can’t really afford making a career only for the collection of academic points.

Gretchen: That’s a good point that there’s an increased sense of urgency to say, “Well, but like, I can’t just write papers that no one is gonna read except my fellow academics. I need to do something actually about the language.” Do you have any examples of something that you think is particularly important from an Indigenous perspective as part of the Western methodologies?

Hanna-Máret: I think that when I tried to do my best to save some languages, even though it’s a big job, and I might not be able to do so much by myself, I think that I’m always focusing on giving back. That is one of the very central principles in Indigenous research. What I mean by “giving back” is that I try to make the project count for the participants already during the active research phase by, for example, donating some of my research time for teaching or working in daycare or, for example, for producing bilingual materials for the teachers and other staff. Things like that. In action research projects, I also try to accommodate the needs of the participants, so that they are then able to move forward with their own action plans. In a way, my role is that of a facilitator and (not always) as an outsider researcher. I’m trying to be the one that facilitates the needs of the participants.

Gretchen: I think that’s a good point about trying to have even the process of the research by good for the participants and not just wait until you get the outcomes, and then it’s gonna be really good once I have finally written up the paper. Two years later, I’m gonna come back, and here’s what I’ve produced. But also the process of participating itself needs to already be something that’s useful for people.

Hanna-Máret: I guess for many of my participants and partners, that’s even the more important thing because they are also learning something when I’m showing them if I’m helping them with some things already during the project then, like I said, many times, the Sámi participants are not the ones who are reading the academic papers. Even if I would come back and tell them that, “Oh, here are five papers that I wrote. They came out in these journals,” they might just be like, “Oh, well, good for you. But we actually enjoyed it more when you were here; you were doing some of the hours; you were doing that and that.” I always try to find the balance so that I can do that, too.

Gretchen: Absolutely. Something like working in the daycare where you’re a Sámi speaker and can be talking to the kids in the daycare in the language or doing some sort of fun activities with them or something like that can be really, really helpful at the time – not just like, “Oh, we came back with this outcome about ‘Here’s how we should change the daycare to make it more effective’,” after all this time.

Hanna-Máret: Exactly.

Gretchen: You’ve also mentioned that there can be a bit of a clash between protectionism and encouragement when it comes to heritage language. Do you wanna talk about that a little bit more?

Hanna-Máret: Sometimes, as a speaker of North Sámi, I wish that we had already reached the same proportions of language shift as some of the smaller Sámi languages.

Gretchen: What is the situation in the smaller Sámi languages at the moment?

Hanna-Máret: There are few languages. For example, here, very close to where I live now, there is a Sámi language called Ume Sámi. There are, at the moment, maybe two, three, maximum ten people that are under 50 years old who are actually learning the language as their first language. The middle generation didn’t learn it as a mother tongue at all. They are just now trying to bring it back to homes. But there are so few people left who can speak the language, even the youngest generations who are now studying at school and parents who are trying to start speaking at home when they have been learning some courses – it’s a really, really different situation than for the North Sámi, the biggest language. For those groups – the only thing that I would then say that I hope that we were also almost at that point that the only thing why I say this is that we are now in the middle of a huge wave of change. The reactions exemplify the clash of this protectionism and encouragement that you were talking about, which I feel sometimes is less prominent in contexts where the community has to work together to save the language from that. They’re already been so close to death so that they just now have to either they completely just don’t work together at all, or they have to do everything for the language. We are not there.

Gretchen: It’s very focusing.

Hanna-Máret: Yeah, exactly. We are not there at all because our strongest speakers – those are the other generations – they see how the language of the young people is changing very rapidly at the moment because, yeah, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, they are winning in that competition. Some of these older people, they react really negatively, and almost they try to cast a protective spell on language and culture. In Sámi culture, we often speak about the “language police,” that is the individuals and collective forces that assess and openly criticise the language of the younger generations or the new speakers. Most of the time, the younger generations, they react as expected, and they stop speaking, and they stop learning the language because, of course, even they are aware of the internal change of the language that is going on between generations. They can hear their language is not the same. They may feel inadequate or wrong or ashamed and many other negative feelings that then re-enforce that reaction, that “stop speaking” reaction. The consequences of that reaction – it is often called the “language stigma,” or we say in Sámi, “language lock,” that’s what we say. It just locks the language somewhere.

Gretchen: It locks a language behind your tongue where it can’t come out of your mouth anymore because you feel so self-conscious about saying it.

Hanna-Máret: Exactly. Of course, I’m not saying that this is what happens everywhere because there are really a skilled people who are very encouraging. They are good at mentoring young people and speakers and those who are new to the language. Those people, they offer support and models and examples of language when the people are needing something to look at. They say that, “Oh, well, you can reach for this,” but they don’t demean the learners when they are in the middle of the process of learning the language. These kind of mentors and teachers, they know that reaching this rich language is very demanding and takes a lot of effort and time and even some luck. They need to support for a long, long time.

Gretchen: They’re not going around shaming the younger people for not speaking the way that they think they should be.

Hanna-Máret: Exactly. There is this little group of people who are doing it in that way. I hope that I also belong to this latter group. I always value the strong speakers of the older generation, but at the same time, I have a very great respect for the younger generations because I know that they will be the elders, the oldest and the best speakers of our language, in the future when we are gone. I try to make the learners feel the pride of the language and to feel that they want to reach for as rich a language as possible, like they would in the majority language. I also always tell them that I am a learner and that no one is ever finished learning the language. Sometimes, that helps. Of course, those who do not have the time or the opportunities to use the language or who are repeatedly discouraged during the process by these “police” or something else, they will probably never become very confident speakers or writers. It is clear that we, the teachers, we play a significant role in the future of our heritage language. We have the means to empower and encourage, but we could also create silence. So, I hope that we are doing the first one and not creating the silence.

Gretchen: There are plenty of older English speakers who are not particularly impressed by how younger English speakers are speaking the language, but because it’s not undergoing a language shift, the younger English speakers are just like, “Oh, well, I’m just gonna keep doing what I’m doing” because it’s not that they’re being shamed out of speaking the language entirely, which is a much different kind of stakes when you have these two different linguistic situations going on.

Hanna-Máret: Exactly, yeah.

Gretchen: One of the things that maybe can contribute to younger people having the opportunity to speak the language or practice a language is this thing that you’ve called “language showers,” which I think is a cute name.

Hanna-Máret: I’m so glad that you like the name. It’s not me. I didn’t come up with that. I saw some newspaper articles in Sweden about language activities for immigrated children, so I felt that was the best way to describe what we were doing.

Gretchen: Maybe we can explain what a “language shower” is.

Hanna-Máret: It’s very important to say that language showers are not the same as full immersion programmes in Canada that you were speaking about earlier, and they are not, also, the same as language nests in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Gretchen: Those full immersion programmes would be more of a “language bath” where you’re fully surrounded by the language?

Hanna-Máret: Exactly. And for long, long periods of time. There is a continuity in that. But language showers, they are all sorts of short-term language immersion activities. They can be language camps and other occasions that aim at creating an environment for the learners where at least the leaders used the target language of the showers. I’ve also seen that this practice has to be amended sometimes. If most of the learners are complete, new beginners. The long-term goal is to create new domains, additional domains, occasions and places and spaces where the target language, the Indigenous language, is heard and used all the time. That’s the goal.

Gretchen: But sometimes, the real-life situation is more complicated.

Hanna-Máret: Yeah, exactly. I’ve seen different examples. I’ve seen that when the language showers are very well planned and the leaders are linguistically skilled and good with the leaners, and when there is enough language support available in the environment, then the showers can truly function as additional engines in the revitalisation process. With “language support,” I mean all kinds of aids ranging from pictures and maps, colours, recordings, music, and film, so that you have every kind of support.

Gretchen: You’re getting more sources of input and examples beyond just what you’re seeing right now in the activity.

Hanna-Máret: Exactly. Because there are so many different levels in those learners. I’ve also seen situations where, for example, the protruding idea of the “orality” of Indigenous languages, while we only speak the language, it can lead to a situation where the learners have nothing else but the spoken word to lean on. Their learning is rather hindered or slowed down because they can only hear a language, and they don’t know anything, they don’t know the language before, and they get tired of listening to that. It’s those who already know how to speak and have some earlier knowledge of the language, they are supported by this kind of method, while the real beginners, they can actually, in some situations, feel quite outside and become very sullen.

Gretchen: That makes sense, yeah. You mentioned that some things need to be changed if most people are completely new beginners because, otherwise, they can feel this isolation.

Hanna-Máret: I think that there has to be a lot of support so that it becomes a language engine. Sometimes, these kinds of language showers, they end up becoming merely cultural meeting places where the language component gets lost on the way. I think that setting up a new language scene needs some really serious thought behind it to really function as a language strengthening domain, while the cultural scene can often be set up much quicker, so you need to really think about “How do we strengthen the language in this domain so that it doesn’t just become something else?”

Gretchen: Because if you just wanna do a cultural thing where you’re making traditional food or doing traditional cultural practices, I dunno, clothing or crafts or something like that, then that’s something you can do with or without the language.

Hanna-Máret: Yeah, and you could just use words and phrases that go together with that but then use the majority language most of the time. It would actually become more like, people do get to know the words, but if they are not actually going to use the language much more than that.

Gretchen: That makes sense. It seems like there’s a lot of scope for using language play as part of the language showers to have this relaxed environment for people.

Hanna-Máret: I think that there is a lot of support in earlier research on language and play for the positive effects of play and playfulness on children’s language learning and also their well being in the majority context. We don’t actually know so much about this when it comes to Indigenous contexts. I’m really glad to be part of an international research initiative. It’s called “NowPlay2.” It is led by Professor Shelley Stagg Peterson at OISE in Toronto, in Canada. Within that project, I’ve had the chance to collaborate with Sámi teachers and learners to really learn more about the effects of play and playfulness in our local, Indigenous Sámi context here in Sweden, and also, at the same time, learn about – there are 20 other Indigenous sites, also, that are part of this project. We are all the time learning how play can strengthen this.

Gretchen: That sounds really cool. We can link to that project in the show notes. You’re someone who’s working both in an academic context and also as a community member of the languages that you’re studying at the same time. How do you balance that insider-outsider situation?

Hanna-Máret: Well, I don’t think that I always manage to find the right balance right away, but I just kind of keep on adjusting my roles until they are, at least, in some kind of balance. I try to keep Shawn Wilson’s 2001 post about the relational accountability in my mind. That means that I am responsible and accountable for all relations to my research partners and participants. But I’m also accountable for the academy. I have to also think about their rules there. I actually get this question quite often. It’s almost a little bit provocative to me. Most researchers who study the use and structure of, let’s say, Swedish in Sweden or maybe English in Canada, they are probably also members of the same language community that they study. They are usually not asked about being an insider and outsider at the same time, although the same logic should, of course, apply to them. Instead, they just need to prove that they do ethical research and that they think about researcher positionality. I think the same should apply to me. I need to be aware of my positionality as a researcher, but the insider-outsider question, I think it should either be skipped, or it should be posed to everyone who is an academic and, at the same time, belongs to the certain community that they are studying.

Gretchen: Maybe asked to everybody to think about “What are the impacts of the research that you’re doing on the people that you’re doing them for?” I think of myself as an insider-outsider when it comes to doing internet linguistics because I was studying people using language on the internet, but I was also very much using language on the internet. For me, writing a pop linguistics book that people on the internet would find interesting to read was a way of being like, “Okay, how do I give back to this particular type of community even though internet people are not traditionally thought of as ‘Oh, this is a marginalised group’ or something like that?” But it is a group that I was studying while also being a part of. Finally, Hanna-Máret, it’s been so great to have you here on the podcast. If you could design a dream project related to Sámi linguistics, what would that be?

Hanna-Máret: Since I already work as a linguist in language education, I’m really lucky to get to do very many things that I might not always write academic papers about but that still matter for the language community and that I also enjoy doing. There are also a few papers that I’m working on at the moment, but most of them are then connected to research projects. If I get to talk about a dream project, then I think that I would really have this one big project in my dreams. It’s about supporting Sámi parents in their language choices and everyday language use. I really wish that I could find these substantial grants, big grants, to support language revitalisation at the grassroots level so that parents could, for example, use the whole year for intensive language studies. It would be so interesting to follow parents who have the opportunity to really take time off their jobs to study the language with the guidance of good teachers. I think that it would be a great development project, revitalisation project, alongside a really fascinating academic study. That would be my big dream study at the moment.

Gretchen: That sounds really cool.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the International Phonetic Alphabet, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like stickers that say, “Ask me about linguistics,” Gavagai rabbit t-shirts, aesthetic IPA posters and more – at lingthusiasm.com/merch.

Lauren’s social media and blog is Superlinguo. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.

You can follow our guest, Dr. Hanna-Máret Outakoski, on her website which we’ll link to in the show notes.

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Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Hanna-Máret: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[superlinguo]

103: A hand-y guide to gesture

Gestures: every known language has them, and there's a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about Lauren's new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press. Is it a general audience book? An academic book? A bit of both. (Please enjoy our highlights version in this episode, a slim guide to the Slim Guide, if you will.) We talk about the wacky hijinks gesture researchers have gotten up to with the aim of preventing people from gesturing without tipping them off that the study is about gesture, including a tricked-out "coloured garden relax chair" that makes people "um" more, as well as crosslinguistic gestural connections between signed and spoken languages, and how Gretchen's gestures in English have been changing after a year of ASL classes. Plus, a few behind-the-scenes moments: Lauren putting a line drawing of her very first gesture study on the cover, and how the emoji connection from Because Internet made its way into Gesture (and also into the emoji on your phone right now).

There were also many other gesture stories that we couldn't fit in this episode, so keep an eye out for Lauren doing guest interviews on other podcasts! We'll add them to the crossovers page and the Lingthusiasm hosts elsewhere playlist as they come up. And if there are any other shows you'd like to hear a gesture episode on, feel free to tell them to chat to Lauren!

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We've made a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo to put on stickers, featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox. There's a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more...see how many items you can recognize!

This sticker (or possibly a subtle variation...stay tuned for an all-patron vote!) will go out to everyone who's a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher as of July 1st, 2025.

We're also hoping that this sticker special offer encourages people to join and stick around as we need to do an inflation-related price increase at the Lingthusiast level. As we mentioned on the last bonus episode, our coffee hasn't cost us five bucks in a while now, and we need to keep paying the team who enables us to keep making the show amid our other linguistics prof-ing and writing jobs. In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguist celebrities! We talk about start with the historically famous Brothers Grimm and quickly move onto modern people of varying levels of fame, including a curiously large number of linguistics figure skaters. We also talk about a few people who are famous within linguistics, including a recent memoir by Noam Chomsky's assistant Bev Stohl about what it was like keeping him fueled with coffee. And finally, we reflect on running into authors of papers we've read at conferences, when people started recognizing us sometimes, and our tips and scripts for navigating celebrity encounters from both sides.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

'Gesture: A Slim Guide' by Lauren Gawne

Lingthusiasm episode 'Emoji are Gesture Because Internet'

Lingthusiasm episode 'Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou'

Lingthusiasm episode 'Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge'

'Gesture, Speech, and Lexical Access: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production' by Rauscher et al.

'Effects of Visual Accessibility and Hand Restraint on Fluency of Gesticulator and Effectiveness of Message' by Karen P. Lickiss and A. Rodney Wellens

'Effects of relative immobilization on the speaker's nonverbal behavior and on the dialogue imagery level' by Rimé et al.

'The effects of elimination of hand gestures and of verbal codability on speech performance' by J. A. Graham and S. Heywood

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles. This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[superlinguo]

Gesture: A Slim Guide - Five Fun Facts

To celebrate the publication of Gesture: A Slim Guide I've selected five facts from/about the book to share:

1. The cover is a deepcut reference to my first gesture research project

Gawne & Kelly (2014) is actually work from my honours project in 2007 - it took us a while to write it up for publication. In that experiment, participants watched a short video narrative and marked everything they thought was a 'gesture' without being given a definition. On the whole, people agree at a minimum level with Gesture Studies researchers about what a gesture is, but tend to include far more in their definition. The cover illustration from Lucy Maddox captures some of the key gestures from that video. Because we had no budget, I filmed the video of myself narrating the story.

2. Learning a signed language will affect the way you gesture in spoken language

Research on learners of ASL shows that learning a signed language affects the gestures of people who have spent their whole life speaking English. Gesture and signed languages are two very different uses of the same modality, but they influence each other in interesting ways.

3. You can make people imagine emphasis differently by changing the placement of emphatic gestures

Hans Rutger Bosker and David Peeters created experimental video clips that you can see here. They took inspiration for their experimental work from the classic McGurk effect in phonetics, where watching a mouth closing like a /g/ while a /b/ sound is played will make the viewer hear a /d/.

4. Dolphins and seals demonstrate the capacity to follow human pointing gestures

While there is evidence that many domestic animals can follow human pointing gestures, this is the only documented evidence to date that shows this skill in wild animals that aren't primates.

5. People still gesture even if their audience can't see them, but the way they gesture changes

Speech and gesture are so closely linked up that we can't help but gesture, even if our audience can't see us. Experiments show that changing the audience conditions changes how large or frequent gestures are, but nothing stops us gesturing completely.

The official launch party for Gesture: A Slim Guide will be the April episode of Lingthusiasm, stay tuned!

Book overview

The gestures that we use when we speak are an important, if often over-looked, part of how we communicate. This book provides a friendly, fast-paced introduction to the field of Gesture Studies. Gestures are those communicative actions made with the human body that accompany spoken or signed language. Paying attention to gesture means paying attention to the fuller context in which humans communicate. Gesture is absolute, in that every human community that has language also has gestures as part of that language. But gesture is also relative, in that it is far more heavily context dependent than other elements of communication. This book provides a broad introduction to current understandings of the nature and function of gesture as a feature of communication. This Slim Guide covers the ways gesture works alongside speech and the different categories of gesture. The way these categories are used varies across cultures and languages, and even across specific interactions. We acquire gesture as part of language, and it is deeply entwined with language in the brain. Gesture has an important role in the origin of language, and in shaping the future of human communication. The study of gesture makes a crucial interdisciplinary contribution to our understanding of human communication. This Slim Guide provides an introduction to Gesture Studies for readers of all backgrounds.

Order links

Bookshop .org (affiliate link)

Amazon (affiliate link)

Booko page (for Australians)

[superlinguo]

In some ways I've been preparing to do this episode since my first year of undergrad linguistics.

Lingthusiasm Episode 102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf

It's a fun science fiction trope: learn a mysterious alien language and acquire superpowers, just like if you'd been zapped by a cosmic ray or bitten by a radioactive spider. But what's the linguistics behind this idea found in books like Babel-17, Embassytown, or the movie Arrival?

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the science and fiction of linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. We talk about a range of different things that people mean when they refer to this hypothesis: a sciencey-sounding way to introduce obviously fictional concepts like time travel or mind control, a reflection that we add new words all the time as convenient handles to talk about new concepts, a note that grammatical categories can encourage us to pay attention to specific areas in the world (but aren't the only way of doing so), a social reflection that we feel like different people in different environments (which can sometimes align with different languages, though not always). We also talk about several genuine areas of human difference that linguistic relativity misses: different perceptive experiences like synesthesia and aphantasia, as well as how we lump sounds into categories based on what's relevant to a given language.

Finally, we talk about the history of where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes from, why Benjamin Lee Whorf would have been great on TikTok, and why versions of this idea keep bouncing back in different guises as a form of curiosity about the human condition no matter how many specific instances get disproven.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany on Goodreads

Lingthusiasm episode on the linguistics of the movie Arrival

History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast episode 31: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Wikipedia entry for 'Edward Sapir'

‘The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ by Harry Hoijer (1954) (archive.org)

Wikipedia entry for 'Ekkehart Malotki'

Wikipedia entry for 'Hopi time controversy'

'Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al. 2003' by Anne Mickan, Maren Schiefke, and Anatol Stefanowitsch

'Do Chinese and English speakers think about time differently? Failure of replicating Boroditsky (2001)' by Jenn-Yeu Chen

'Does grammatical gender affect object concepts? Registered replication of Phillips and Boroditsky (2003)' by Nan Elpers, Greg Jensen, and Kevin J. Holmes

'Future tense and saving money: no correlation when controlling for cultural evolution' by Seán G. Roberts, James Winters, and Keith Chen

Lingthusiasm bonus episode ‘North, left, or towards the sea? Interview with Alice Gaby’

'Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210' Interview by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah for The Paris Review (unpaywalled photos here)

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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).